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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/25850449">Nothing But A Song</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/paperstorm/pseuds/paperstorm'>paperstorm</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>The Old Guard (Comics), The Old Guard (Movie 2020)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Anal Fingering, Anal Sex, Bottom Nicky | Nicolò di Genova, Canon Queer Relationship, Established Relationship, Even tho in this particular fic they aren't married yet, Explicit Sexual Content, Immortal Husbands Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova, M/M, No seriously proceed with caution there is an unbearable amount of romance, POV Nicky | Nicolò di Genova, Porn with Feelings, Pre-Canon, Romance, What Happened in Malta (The Old Guard)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-08-11</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-08-11</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-05 05:48:28</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Explicit</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>4,601</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/25850449</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/paperstorm/pseuds/paperstorm</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p><i>“Happy – what did you call it? Octocentenary.”<br/><br/>“Do you think we’re the only two who have ever celebrated such a thing?”<br/><br/>“I couldn’t say for sure. It does seem likely.” Joe reaches back behind himself for the bottle, and holds it out between them. “To us.”</i><br/>//<br/>AKA, an imagining of <b>that</b> time in Malta.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>100</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>720</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Nothing But A Song</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>I watched the movie last night and just fell absolutely head-over-ass in love with these two, I was twitchy all day until I got this out of my system.</p><p>Fic title is from a lovely song by Great Big Sea with the lyric <i>You never leave a love so rare / You never leave a love so long / Remember that the life we share is nothing but a song</i></p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The blue of the Mediterranean Sea has never been so brightly, brilliantly azure, Nicky thinks, as the steamship ferry slowly travels along it. Although, perhaps it has. He’s spent a dozen lifetimes along its beguiling shores, and would not recall every moment its been this beautiful. But this time, even if there have certainly been others, seems particularly lovely.<br/>
 <br/>
“Am I permitted to be told where we’re going, yet?” he asks.<br/>
 <br/>
To his left, the golden-brown skin of the other half of his soul glows similarly in the sunlight, illuminated as if he’s lit from the inside. As if there is a phosphorescent lifeforce inside of him that spills out through every pore. In a way, Nicky supposes, there is.<br/>
 <br/>
His rich brown eyes crease at the edges as he turns his face to Nicky. Because they are near the back of the ferry and it is only sparsely populated, they are out-of-sight enough for Joe to lean in and brush his nose, just once, against Nicky’s. “In time,” he says, quiet and close.<br/>
 <br/>
“I know where this ferry goes. Unless you’ve bribed the driver to reroute us to Africa.”<br/>
 <br/>
A soft laugh, and a softer touch; the backs of Joe’s knuckles sliding over Nicky’s cheek, hand settling, warm and achingly familiar, on the side of Nicky’s neck. “I haven’t, no.”<br/>
 <br/>
“So, Malta.”<br/>
 <br/>
“Malta,” Joe agrees.<br/>
 <br/>
“Why Malta? We’re not meeting Andy, are we?”<br/>
 <br/>
Joe shakes his head. “I had a letter from her, two weeks ago. She’s with Sebastien, in Paris. Spending some time with him there. She says he wants us to call him Booker. Says his name reminds him too much of things he’d rather not think about.”<br/>
 <br/>
“Is he alright?” Nicky worries.<br/>
 <br/>
“She says he's struggling. The last of his family is gone, now.” Joe takes the risk of pressing an unhurried kiss to Nicky’s lips, delighting him as it always does, but cut short as footsteps approach and they separate in time to remain undetected by a family that walks past them toward the stairs to the upper deck.<br/>
 <br/>
“Why Malta?” Nicky asks again.<br/>
 <br/>
“Why not? It rains too much in London. You’re beautiful in the sunshine,” Joe answers, and doesn’t elaborate.<br/>
 <br/>
The water continues to sparkle around them as the shimmering island appears in the distance, and they sit close, but not too close, and Nicky doesn’t ask any more questions.<br/>
 <br/>
A horse and buggy drops them off at the front entrance to a four-storey hotel, with a pale stone face and columns that remind Nicky of his youth and windows painted blue around the edges. It overlooks the harbour, where the water is nearly eclipsed by the bustle of ships and the noise from horses and engines and chatter is loud in their ears. Nicky waits outside, as Joe approaches the concierge. They don’t always remain in the shadows. Sometimes, when they’re feeling emboldened by anger and injustice and the inability of puny minds to comprehend the weight of their love for each other, they flaunt themselves, and take the beatings that come after, because their wounds never last. But that’s only sometimes. Most of the time, it’s easier this way. Easier to avoid the frowns and the questions, and the possibility of capture or imprisonment. The worst thing, Nicky thinks, would be permanent separation. He couldn’t survive it, but he would have to. No easy way out, for people like them. It’s not worth the risk.<br/>
 <br/>
Joe calls to him, covertly, from a third-floor window, and sneaks Nicky in through a side entrance. Joe greets him in the stairwell as if they are long-lost lovers, separated for decades rather than less than 20 minutes, with a sound kiss and his strong hands gripping Nicky’s waist.<br/>
 <br/>
“You’re insatiable,” Nicky tells him, and it isn’t a complaint.<br/>
 <br/>
“For you? Always,” Joe returns, easy banter, loving embraces, the warmth of it all like a blanket around their shoulders.<br/>
 <br/>
He leads Nicky up the flights, and down a long, narrow hallway to their room. 312, the brass numbers on the door announce. The handle is ornate, and the key scrapes as Joe inserts it into the lock.<br/>
 <br/>
“Now are you going to tell me why we’re here?” Nicky asks, glancing around. The room is modestly sized, but warm and inviting. Sumptuously decorated. The ocean outside their window has the smell of salt wafting in, calling to them serenely with the gentle crashing of waves on rocks and ramparts. Perhaps later, after the sun has gone down and bathed their surroundings in the protective cloak of darkness, they could soak in it together. It would not be the first – or tenth, or thousandth – time Nicky has kissed him in the moonlight with the ocean lapping at their ankles, but he never tires of it.<br/>
 <br/>
“Feeling suspicious, my love?” <br/>
 <br/>
“Constantly. You always have something up your sleeve.” <br/>
 <br/>
Joe’s lips curve into a smile. He is clean-shaven, just now, which is unusual. It had been part of their disguise on their last mission. He’s always the most gorgeous thing Nicky has ever set eyes on, but he’s looking forward to the coming days and weeks when a thick beard begins to reappear, and Joe transforms back into the man he fell in love with. Joe takes the rucksack from off Nicky’s shoulder and deposits it on the foot of the bed, and says to it, “worried I have some big plan or announcement? For what sorts of things do people book spontaneous hotel rooms in beautiful places, a raise in salary? Marriage proposals?”<br/>
 <br/>
Nicky frowns at him, instantly curious, and then laughs softly when he sees the twisted smile on Joe’s handsome face. “Very funny. ‘til death do us part. What would it mean?”<br/>
 <br/>
“It is not large enough, for us. A procedural vow of only a few short, parroted sentences could not hope to encompass all that you are to me. How could one fit the enormity of the universe into such a meager thing?”<br/>
 <br/>
“We couldn’t anyway. Not here. Not now.” Nicky has never known how to properly respond, when Joe says things of that nature. It is eight centuries, this year, since they met, and he has not worked out in all those hundreds of years how to return in kind the poetry Joe speaks to him so casually, as if for him it is not effort at all. If his people knew, all those centuries ago, that men like Joe existed in the Holy Land, they could not have thought them barbarians. It would not have been possible. They were so tragically, disastrously wrong.<br/>
 <br/>
Joe just continues to smile at him. There’s no sadness in it. It isn’t a hardship, for them, like it is for others. They would not be allowed to enter into a modern marriage contract and it doesn’t matter. In the ways that do, they have been married since the morning they drove their swords into each other and did not cease to live like all those around them.<br/>
 <br/>
“Yusuf,” Nicky implores, gesturing around them at splendours tapestries and silver candelabras. He is unused to such decadence.<br/>
 <br/>
“Do you notice,” Joe muses, stepping closer, “that I become Yusuf again when you are impatient? And you become Nicolo when I am especially infatuated.”<br/>
 <br/>
“You aren’t always?” Nicky teases.<br/>
 <br/>
Another smile, and arms curled around his waist, and a kiss pressed to his cheek. “I am, always. Always, always. We are here because we have known too much violence, beloved. You deserve to watch a million sunsets with someone who loves you holding your hand.”<br/>
 <br/>
“I have,” Nicky says, the words sighed happily as he brushes his hand over Joe’s curls. He lets his arms drape over broad shoulders.<br/>
 <br/>
“A million more, then. We’ll start here, with fourteen. In this beautiful place, so close to where you were born. Near enough to where we met, on the other side of the sea.”<br/>
 <br/>
“Where I saw you for the first time. With blood on your shirt and a sword in your hand. Trying to kill me. Succeeding.” <br/>
 <br/>
“You tried to kill me first.” <br/>
 <br/>
“I know. I’m sorry.” <br/>
 <br/>
“None of that,” Joe soothes. His nose brushes against Nicky’s again, like it had on the ship, only this time it can brush back and forth.<br/>
 <br/>
“Even though it’s been centuries, I can’t forget, you know? That I was taught to despise you, when I was meant to love you.” <br/>
 <br/>
“You do now. And I love you with the strength of a thousand suns and ten million lifetimes,” Joe whispers to him. “Eight-hundred years. Did you remember that?”<br/>
 <br/>
“Of course I did. Is that why we’re here? It’s our octocentenary?”<br/>
 <br/>
“Perhaps.” Joe’s hand slides, warm and smooth, underneath the linen of Nicky’s shirt, and presses him closer. His heat, the lovely herbal way he always smells, seeps into Nicky’s skin, sinks down as far as his bones. Dark eyes lock to his, seeing so much more than Nicky would ever show to anyone else, but for Joe, he lays it bare. Lets his lover see whatever he wants to in the contours of Nicky’s face, the icy blue of his eyes. Joe has always seen him. Always.<br/>
 <br/>
“It was in the summer.”<br/>
 <br/>
“I know. I couldn’t recall the date. I doubt I ever knew it.”<br/>
 <br/>
“The 13<sup>th</sup> of July,” Nicky tells him, and Joe cocks his head to one side, his expression caught between curious and impressed. “I never knew it, either. I looked it up, decades ago. Our deaths were never recorded so it’s difficult to know for sure, but from what I remember …”<br/>
 <br/>
“We will have to return, then,” Joe decides. “We’re two months early.”<br/>
 <br/>
“It isn’t important. I didn’t love you, that day, anyway.”<br/>
 <br/>
“I think you did.” Joe kisses his forehead and keeps Nicky wrapped up tightly in his arms, begins to sway as if they’re dancing to music only they can hear. “Perhaps your head didn’t know it, yet, but your heart did.”<br/>
 <br/>
Nicky smiles and feels it to his toes as Joe bumps their foreheads together and keeps swaying to the invisible beat. “So, what’s on the schedule? Other than sunsets and hand-holding.”<br/>
 <br/>
“That market we passed on the way in is calling my name.”<br/>
 <br/>
“Do you suppose they have Turkish coffee?”<br/>
 <br/>
“I’m almost certain of it.”<br/>
 <br/>
The market does have Turkish coffee. And dates, and nuts, and all manner of things that make them both think of home, even though their first homes are long ago and far away and their eternal homes are each other, no matter where in the world they are. The grey of London and the blazing heat of the Sahara and the horror of a battlefield are still home, as long as Joe is there with him. They don’t dare hold hands, here, but Joe stays close, and Nicky can always feel him. Feel his presence, feel his soul, tethered to his own on a golden string.<br/>
 <br/>
They feed each other dried dates, later, undressed in the soft bed with a smooth sheet draped over their intertwined legs. Joe is so lovely in candlelight, as he said Nicky was in sunlight. His eyes shine, reflecting Nicky’s own back to him. The soft curve of his lips is resplendent, as Nicky brings a piece of fruit to them and Joe parts them for him. His tongue slides, warm and wet, along Nicky’s fingers. Inside, he sparkles. He would have thought, back before he knew all that he knows now, that he might be tired of someone after eight hundred years. He would have been wrong. It’s the most wonderful thing in the world, to be known the way that Joe knows him.<br/>
 <br/>
“What are you thinking?” Joe asks, cupping Nicky’s face in his hand and rubbing underneath his eye.<br/>
 <br/>
Nicky tilts into it, kissing Joe’s wrist. “Of you. How much I adore you. The way the world feels tipped on it’s head if I’m away from you for even one day.”<br/>
 <br/>
“Then it’s a good thing I haven’t tired of you, yet.” Joe grins at him, laughter dancing in his eyes.<br/>
 <br/>
“I am lucky,” Nicky says, far too seriously for the joke Joe was trying to make.<br/>
 <br/>
He frowns, and leans in for a delicate kiss. “I could never tire of you. Not if we outlive the Earth, the universe. I would find you in death, I would hold onto you as we are made back into stars.”<br/>
 <br/>
“I know,” Nicky whispers back. He tugs Joe down on top of him, surrounding him, pressing him into the mattress.<br/>
 <br/>
On the second day, Joe draws him. They lounge in an empty field outside of town, in the sunshine, and Joe pulls a sketchbook from his pocket and drags a pencil across it, recreating the lines of Nicky’s nose and jaw, his closed eyes, the hair falling across his forehead, as Nicky soaks in the heat and warmth. He doesn’t know Joe is doing it, until the sketch is almost finished, and Joe shifts in closer in the long grass to show him. Light and life burst from the dusty page, as if Joe has captured his very soul in parchment and charcoal.<br/>
 <br/>
“Stunning,” Nicky tells him. “The love of my life, such a talent.”<br/>
 <br/>
“I have an excellent muse,” Joe responds, with a bashful smile.<br/>
 <br/>
They do swim, on the fourth evening. They find a small, mostly deserted beach on the West side of the island, and return on foot after the sun has set. There isn’t a soul around, they can make out objects in the darkness only because it’s a clear night and the moon is full. They undress each other on the shore and step into warm water, wading in up to their hips before Nicky grabs Joe around the waist and plasters himself to Joe’s back.<br/>
 <br/>
Joe laughs, loud and free, and turns in his arms, letting Nicky lift him up for a moment so he has to duck down to kiss him. “You are beautiful in moonlight, as well,” Joe murmurs against his lips, as he slides back down to standing on his own, his body rubbing deliciously along Nicky’s. Blood moves in his veins, thick and slow like honey.<br/>
 <br/>
“You are beautiful in all lighting, all colors, all backdrops, all moments in time,” Nicky says, and thrills at the way Joe’s cheeks flush. What he thinks is, maybe he himself is the moon, if Joe is the sun.<br/>
 <br/>
On the sixth day, Nicky’s pale shoulders are reddened from too much time in the sun, and Joe lovingly teases him about it as he rubs oil into Nicky’s skin. It ends, as such things often do, with deep kisses and squeezing fingers and roaming hands, finding salvation in each other as they have more times than Nicky could possibly have kept count of.<br/>
 <br/>
“Do you remember the first time you kissed me?” Joe asks, after, with his head pillowed on Nicky’s chest and Nicky’s fingers tangled in his curls.<br/>
 <br/>
“Of course.” Nicky draws patterns with the fingers of his other hand up and down Joe’s arm. Protective sigils from long-dead religions, things he’s sure he doesn’t believe in anymore but draws on Joe sometimes anyway, just in case.<br/>
 <br/>
“I couldn’t remember every kiss, not 800 years of them, but I remember that one,” Joe continues, in a dreamy voice. He is more emotional than Nicky. Quicker to anger, and indignance, and ferociously protective of those he loves. His fire burns quick and hot, and when it melts into languid moments such as this, where he’s introspective and soft-hearted, it’s Nicky who aches to protect him. The world has not always been kind to this man.<br/>
 <br/>
“I remember you pulled away from me. At first. And then kissed me back so fiercely I thought I would suffocate.”<br/>
 <br/>
“I already knew I loved you.” Joe’s nose finds the hollow under Nicky’s jaw and tucks there, safe and cared for. “Just didn’t believe you could ever feel it, too.”<br/>
 <br/>
“I love you more than anything,” Nicky promises. “More than everything.”<br/>
 <br/>
On the eighth night, Joe sneaks a bottle of wine from the kitchens into his rucksack and they head out after dark once again, to a ledge they’d spotted earlier, high up on the city walls. They don’t have to be as careful, as others do. It would be preferable that they didn’t slip and cascade off the wall to the ground far below, but they would live, if they did. And they are very accustomed to pain. Not so that it doesn’t hurt, but so that they don’t mind so much if it does.<br/>
 <br/>
Joe hops up easily onto the ledge, and reaches his hand down to help Nicky up after him. They walk precariously along it, one foot deliberately in front of the other, until they can sit with their feet hanging over the side and look out over the city. There are lamps still lit, and windows still illuminated, so it glitters before them like diamonds. Like the island is performing a jeweled ballet just for them.<br/>
 <br/>
Joe takes the bottle from his bag and uncorks it, tossing the stopper down to the streets below.<br/>
 <br/>
“I suppose that means we’ll have to finish it,” Nicky says, amused, as Joe takes a long drink before handing it over. Nicky watches his throat move as he swallows, and wants to lick it.<br/>
 <br/>
“I don’t suppose you’ll be drunk off half a bottle of wine.” Joe winks at him, and Nicky laughs.<br/>
 <br/>
“Would you carry me home, if I am?”<br/>
 <br/>
“Of course I would, habibi.”<br/>
 <br/>
Nicky drinks, the rich bouquet bursting over his taste-buds, and hands it back. Joe takes it, but instead twists around to set it on the other side of himself on the ledge. Then he takes Nicky’s face in his hands and kisses him, with the sweet taste of wine on his tongue.<br/>
 <br/>
“Happy – what was it? Octocentenary.”<br/>
 <br/>
“Do you think we’re the only two who have ever celebrated such a thing?”<br/>
 <br/>
“I couldn’t say for sure. It does seem likely.” Joe reaches back behind himself for the bottle, and holds it out between them. “To us.”<br/>
 <br/>
Smiling, Nicky mimes holding a glass in his own hand and bumps his knuckles against the wine bottle in an imaginary cheers.<br/>
 <br/>
In the blaring sun of their 12<sup>th</sup> afternoon, a cart carrying oranges hits a bump in the road and overturns at the top of a hill, sending the bright, round fruits cascading down like a waterfall, bouncing off gutters and sidewalk curbs. A hoard of frantic children chase after them, scattering around, their delighted screams echoing through the stone streets as they race to catch a rare treat. Joe and Nicky watch from a nearby bench, and laugh, and laugh, and laugh until their stomachs hurt.<br/>
 <br/>
On their last night, Nicky comes fresh from the bath back into the room with the towel in his hand rather than around his waist, unashamedly bare for the man from whom he hasn’t hid a thing in centuries. Joe looks up as he enters, and slumps dramatically back in the chair, clapping a hand over his heart and making a wounded noise as if he’s been shot.<br/>
 <br/>
Nicky flushes, all the way down his chest. “Stop.”<br/>
 <br/>
“<em>You </em>stop. Stop being so utterly gorgeous, I can’t take it.”<br/>
 <br/>
“Get over here and kiss me, then.”<br/>
 <br/>
Joe grins slyly and shakes his head, holding out his hand instead and making Nicky go to him. Nicky does, and Joe drinks him in with hungry eyes, pulling on his hand so Nicky settles onto his thighs. The chair creaks miserably under their combined bulk, so Nicky tightens his muscles so all his weight isn’t resting on its poor wooden legs. Joe taps his own bottom lip with his finger, and Nicky chuckles.<br/>
 <br/>
“I always have to do all the work.”<br/>
 <br/>
“No you don’t,” Joe says, with a smile, into their kiss.<br/>
 <br/>
“No, I don’t,” Nicky agrees. The heavens always seem to part when their mouths meet and this is no exception. Joe kisses with the fierceness that he brings to everything else, the way he fights, the way he survives, the way he loves. His hands cup Nicky’s bare hips, fingers squeezing into him hard enough to bruise if he were merely human.<br/>
 <br/>
“Take me to bed,” Nicky asks, pleads, would get down on his knees and beg if he had to. But Joe would never make him do that.<br/>
 <br/>
“That’s all I want.” Joe holds around his waist and stands, taking Nicky up with him, walking him backwards towards it. “To be close to you. To touch you.”<br/>
 <br/>
Nicky sits, and then falls backwards, bouncing on the mattress, gazing adoringly up at the man who gazes adoringly back. Joe pulls his shirt up and over his head, leaving his hair messy, and rids himself of his trousers so he, too is bare. Nicky barely gets a moment to look at him, at his bronze skin and the planes of his muscles, at the black curls between his legs and the cock that hangs beneath it, before Joe is draping himself over Nicky, smothering him, kissing him again with his thigh rubbing between Nicky’s own legs.<br/>
 <br/>
“Make love to you,” Joe continues, a rasp in his voice and passion oozing from his kiss.<br/>
 <br/>
“Per favore,” Nicky breathes. He craves it, aches for it, longs for it always, even when it’s been mere hours since the last time. A proper addiction, a fever he can never sweat out.<br/>
 <br/>
“You are my North Star,” Joe tells him. “If I followed you when I was lost it would not be long before I found home again.”<br/>
 <br/>
“My everything,” Nicky answers, feeling the surge of it swell in his throat.<br/>
 <br/>
“My Nicolo,” Joe murmurs.<br/>
 <br/>
“Please,” Nicky says again, about to burn up with how desperately he needs it.<br/>
 <br/>
Joe never stops kissing him. Not as he slides his hips to one side of Nicky’s so he can slip his hand down, thumbing over his nipples on the way, and curl sure, strong fingers around his cock, stroking him fully to hardness as Nicky whimpers into his mouth. Not as his fingers search lower, squeezing the sac that sits swollen against his thighs. Not as his fingers probe underneath, and Nicky reaches blindly for the bedside table to hand him the oil. His tongue slides, slow and hot, into Nicky’s mouth as his fingers slide into Nicky’s body, two at once because Nicky can take it and likes the burn of the stretch. It swirls around Nicky’s, licking the insides of his cheeks, over his teeth, and his fingers bend and find it, the place inside that lights him up like a firecracker caught in thick molasses.<br/>
 <br/>
“Yusuf,” Nicky breathes out, on a soft moan, helpless to his talented fingers but vibrating in his want for more.<br/>
 <br/>
“Impatient,” Joe reminds him, with a fond chuckle and another pass over the spot inside.<br/>
 <br/>
Nicky’s back arches off the bed and then collapses back down, laughing along with him. “Me? Impatient?”<br/>
 <br/>
“Unheard of, I know.”<br/>
 <br/>
“Are you – how did you put it? Particularly infatuated?”<br/>
 <br/>
“Oh, Nicolo.” Joe’s eyes are liquid obsidian, and the weight of the kiss he presses to Nicky’s forehead is as enormous as a mountain. “You were right. I am always.”<br/>
 <br/>
The spot deep inside is pressed once again, massaged this time with more intent, and Nicky’s moan is loud and wanton to his own ears.<br/>
 <br/>
“The noises you make,” Joe whispers, lips finding Nicky’s again and swallowing another whimper from his mouth. “The most beautiful music.”<br/>
 <br/>
“It feels incredible. But, more, please.”<br/>
 <br/>
“Another?” Joe asks, teasing the tip of a third finger against Nicky’s slick entrance.<br/>
 <br/>
He shakes his head, slides his own fingers into Joe’s hair and angles his head for a harder kiss. “You,” he says, when they break away, breathless.<br/>
 <br/>
“You already have me.” Joe’s voice lilts, teasing again, and by all the stars in the sky and every blade of grass on the Earth, Nicky loves him.<br/>
 <br/>
He pushes a hand between them to take hold of Joe’s erection, rubbing his thumb over the exposed slit where it’s wet. “This,” he clarifies, smirking when Joe’s eyes slip out of focus and a pretty little wrinkle appears between his eyebrows. “I need this.”<br/>
 <br/>
“Me too,” Joe says, mouthing along Nicky’s jaw. His fingers are gone, and just for a moment Nicky feels empty, but then the blunt head of his cock is pressing into him, slick with the oil, sliding slow and steady into him, pushing out all other thoughts that might have been lingering somewhere in the shadowy corners of Nicky’s mind. He clings, arms tight around Joe’s shoulders, nails digging into his skin, as Joe’s thighs come flush with Nicky’s backside and he’s filled completely.<br/>
 <br/>
Nicky shudders through a sigh, and Joe kisses him deeply, and only pauses for a moment before he moves again, because he knows Nicky’s body, knows it better than he knows his own. He knows what Nicky can take, what he likes, what he aches for in his dreams.<br/>
 <br/>
It’s always loving, always pleasurable, but this time it feels thunderous. Because it’s their final night, maybe, of the loveliest escape from reality Nicky can remember in a long time. Because Joe’s passion has been unquenchable, because his smiles have been sun-kissed and his words laced in gold. Because their shared soul thrives like a palm near a wide window when they’re able to be locked away together somewhere beautiful, just the two of them, no cares and no obligations.<br/>
 <br/>
Tomorrow, Nicky thought earlier, they should head to Paris. If the newest member of their team – their family – is in need of comfort and closeness, all Nicky wants, tomorrow, is to give that to him. To listen as he talks and sympathize as he rages and wrap six arms around him if he breaks. Tomorrow. Tonight, he just wants this. Joe above him, thrusting sharply inside him, kissing him like he won’t be able to remember how to breathe if he stops.<br/>
 <br/>
He comes with a sob and a shiver that dances along his whole body, and Joe’s lips still on his, Joe’s body fused with his own. He holds on, and whispers encouragement, until Joe tips over his own edge with a soft grunt in Nicky’s ear and sweat that drips off the end of his nose and lands on Nicky’s shoulder. He laughs, when he can catch his breath, and Nicky laughs too, because he’s <em>happy</em>.<br/>
 <br/>
“Paris, tomorrow?” Joe asks, echoing Nicky’s thoughts because they’ve always been able to read each other’s minds, after he’s pulled himself out and cleaned them up and Nicky is cradled, warm and so loved, in his arms.<br/>
 <br/>
“Just what I was thinking.” Nicky smiles sleepily, and nuzzles into his lover’s warm neck.<br/>
 <br/>
“I assumed so.” Joe, this time, draws on Nicky’s back. Perhaps spelling words in Arabic. Nicky can’t be sure, but he feels more protected in an instant.<br/>
 <br/>
“They need us.”<br/>
 <br/>
“And we need them.”<br/>
 <br/>
Nicky kisses the skin underneath his lips. “This was wonderful.”<br/>
 <br/>
“It had been too long, since I saw you smile so much the lines stay around your eyes. I had missed it.”<br/>
 <br/>
“Ti amo,” Nicky murmurs, in his native tongue. <em>I love you</em>. <br/>
 <br/>
Joe hums, deep and rumbling in his chest. He rolls them, ending up back on top of Nicky so he can duck his head down and kiss him deeply. Sunflowers bloom inside Nicky’s heart. “Until the end of the universe,” Joe says. Nicky believes him.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Thank you for reading!</p><p>Come talk to me <a href="http://paper-storm.tumblr.com/">on tumblr</a> if you want!</p></blockquote></div></div>
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